They descend by a different path to a rocky beach. As they near the water, all of them, by some unspoken agreement, begin to unfasten shoes and roll off socks. All, that is, except for Bill, who decides to remove everything he is wearing. He stands there, scrawny and pale, with a bib of red where the sun has caught him above his shirt collar, and everything above his collarbone an entirely different colour to all below, proud as an emperor. This is enough to make them laugh. But even more so when a small kayık with three figures in it – three women – appears round the nub of the headland.
Instantly Bill is transformed into a cringing, shrinking figure, hopping across the sharp stones to cower behind a screen of rocks which are not quite up to the task. No one thinks to tell him that while most of him is hidden the entirety of his white backside emerges above the rocks like a strange beached sea-creature. Perhaps even if they wanted to they could not form the words: they are beside themselves. George cannot remember the last time he laughed quite like this – stomach clenched in an almost-agony, gasping for breath. Every time he thinks he has recovered himself the images will return: the scurry across the hot beach, the coquettish emergence of Bill’s white bottom.
The kayık has disappeared from view – it never did come near enough for there to be any real danger of embarrassment. Now they wade into the water and remove their clothes surreptitiously, piling them on a large flat rock that emerges in a dry shelf. It is mercifully cold, despite the heat of the day; a preparation is still required before the plunge. They become schoolboys for a time, splashing and jostling – teasing Bill until the joke has been fully used up, as though it is some precious rationed commodity from which they must take every morsel. Then, little by little, each enters his own private realm.
George turns onto his back and sculls a little way away from the group. The sky above him is vast. It is a strange tension of opposites: his body held in the water’s cold grip, his face warmed by the sun. From the shore, faint but distinct, comes the scent of pine and herb. Heaven, he thinks, would be something rather like this – at least in his book. After this thought, inevitably, comes a small splash of guilt. But he has to strain, almost, to feel it. Home seems so far away – and somehow hardly real, as dreamlike a place as Constantinople would have seemed had he tried to fathom its existence back in London.
‘Gawd,’ Briggs says, scattering these thoughts like a pebble pitched into a shoal of fish. ‘I’m starved.’
‘You always are.’
‘A tapeworm, probably …’
‘Take that back, you scoundrel. I have a healthy appetite, that’s all. A man’s appetite. And the food here: all that spice. Like trying to eat something splashed with a woman’s parfum. Give me … roast beef and potatoes, no flavouring but gravy.’
‘Fish pie.’
‘Kidneys in brown butter.’
Groans of agony and pleasure.
They want to go home, George thinks. They’ve stayed on, what … for an adventure? A chance to see more of the world? A little extra in the pay packet? They don’t have any vestige of this thing that exists within him. The desire to stay. Or, to call it by its proper name, the fear of return.
On the journey back, Bill makes his thoughts on the new patient’s arrival clear. This is a hospital for officers of the British army, not for small Turkish boys.
George is circumspect enough to know that he might have felt the same if the situation had been reversed.
‘I could not refuse.’
‘No,’ Bill said. ‘But you should explain now that you will need to move him. The Red Cross are taking in refugees, locals – they would take him.’
George respects Bill too much to think of reminding him that he is of an inferior rank. More than this, he knows that Bill is right. ‘I need to keep him at least until we can be certain he is clear from danger.’
‘Because every time you let her into the hospital you expose us to more risk. What if, one day, she decides to bring a gun with her? She – yes – a woman, could kill most of the men in the ward before we had time to stop her. How do you know that it hasn’t been her plan all along? That the child isn’t merely a ruse?’
George is irritated. ‘You are starting to sound rather paranoid, Bill. Perhaps you’ve had too much sun.’
‘I think perhaps you are the one who has been dazzled, Monroe.’
‘What do you mean by that, exactly?’
Perhaps Bill decides that he has made his point, or perhaps he remembers that George outranks him. Because now he says, placatory, ‘I understand that you feel a duty of care. But afterward?’
‘I will consider the Red Cross.’
This is the first time he can remember lying to Bill. They have shared more than most brothers. He has told the man his fears. They have wept together. George has even shared with him his personal burden of guilt. And about that Bill – though he perhaps did not understand, or approve – kept his counsel.
Why the lie? Why the certainty?
It is due partly to the child, he knows, the responsibility he feels for this young patient. It has awoken something latent in him. And it is due partly to her, the mother. Perhaps if she had fallen to her knees and begged and wept, it would in fact have been different. It is her fortitude that compels him to do this thing for her.
Nur
In the small hours of the night she wakes to hear a tapping downstairs – so quiet that at first she
